I am done the clay aspect of my work. I am now leaving it to dry so it can be fired soon and hopefully finished soon. I am very happy with how it is going, especially the little scraps of clay that I added to the sculpture to help create more texture and interest.

I fixed it! I reattached the hand and refined some of its aspects like the knuckles and fingers. I still need to refine the anatomy of my hand, but It is going well and I am not looking for a super realistic hand, so it it going well. I am overall just happy that I repaired it.

Jessica Stroller's artwork relates directly(-ish) to mine because we both work in themes of the somewhat grotesque and morbid. We also both work with clay, albeit very different types of clay but clay nonetheless. I chose her because I was googling "artists who use clay" and clicked on an article that listed "20 artists shaping the face of ceramics." Most of the works and artists shown I didn't like, but then I found Stroller, and her work intrigued me. She reminded me of Doreen Garner (the sculptor I did my two page spread on) but more delicate and less in your face. I loved how she was able to manipulate her medium so well. She can create so many different textures and feelings with just porcelain. It boggles my mind. Learning her process in creating so many textures and how she starts these works I think will be very beneficial to me. Her work is so pristine and precise and her coloring is on point, and I would love to be able to learn how to make ones work so clean. I would of course have to transfer my learning from her into a slightly different media, however, so it might be challenging.

Background: 
     Stroller was born in 1981 in Michigan, although currently she lives and works in Brooklyn New York. In 2004 she got her BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit Michigan, and in 2006 she got her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. From an early age she was instilled with the appreciation of elegant handmade objects and antiques, as both her mother and Grandmother worked at an Auction house, but she never really embraced "capital A art" until high school where she was encouraged to pursue ceramics. As a teenager, she grew bored of the monotony of suburb life, wanting to escape and live in a creative expressive environment, which she felt pursuing art as a career path could give her. 
     She starts her creative process with a sketch, using lots of reference photos and often even using her own body as a model for some of her work. When actually working with the clay, she starts with a variety of different methods like slabbing, coiling and wheel-throwing. one the structure is built, she goes in with details. She uses various surface treatments to get her desired results such as piping, carving, burning out firings. Then she allows it to dry very slowly before she bisque fires it. She paints the sculptures with up to ten layers to get her desired effect, using china paint, which allows her to have more subtlety detail and precision than simply using the standard glazes. She considers the firing process to be the scariest part of the whole process. Stoller works so hard creating the shape prior to firing, building evenly and having a long drying period, but when she is firing it she is "relinquishing control" to the kiln. She considers working in clay to be masochistic because of that, and because of her constant recreating of works when the don't turn out the way she envisioned. 
     Disclaimer, she is not famous in the traditional sense yet, and she really hasn't impacted art history at this point in time, but her artwork has personally impacted me.

Yeah, so I accidentally destroyed my sculpture. This is the story: I came in during lunch to work on it can get all of the paper and plastic out before the long weekend and because we wouldn't be having art due to the early release. All was going well. I got some of the paper out, but my arm wouldn't fit up high enough to get the paper out of the hand, so we had to cut the hand off and then reattach it later. It was actually quite fun cutting the hand off. Once it was off we were able to pull the rest of the armature out with only minor damage to the hand itself. I reattached it fine and went about fixing some minor details. It was the end of lunch and I had to be getting to my class, so I was trying to clean up. I picked up my sculpture by the forearm and tilted it at at 45 degrees angle. The hand slipped right off and smashed into a yogurt cup that held vinegar. It is super deformed. To make matters worse, just then my bus was called to leave for the early dismissal, so I couldn't fix any of it and had to rush through cleaning everything so that I wouldn't be stranded at school. I don't really know how to continue in this project without basically completely restarting the creation of the hand.

Today I made a lot of progress with my sculpture. I finished adding the clay and I am in the process of sculpting the fingers. I am happy with my progress and the way the sculpture seems to be going. I have realized today that I don't hate clays as much as I thought I just hate wedging and rolling the slabs. Creating actual fine detail I relatively enjoy.

Technically today is my third day working on this project. but I forgot to upload the progress post for the second day so I'll include a picture of it below, but it is kind of hard to see because it is covered in plastic. The creation of my work is going fine, it is chunkier than I would like and not quite a smooth as desired but these are all things I can fix in future class periods. I enjoy the process of cutting out strips of clay from large slabs and stacking them onto of each other to build up the height. I am apprehensive about making the hand because the clay is so thick, but this is a problem for a later day.